I first met Petra Wille, a fellow product coach, at Mind the Product and was immediately impressed with her work. While I tend to focus on helping teams, Petra’s work centers around helping product leaders—the people who manage product managers. The people in these roles don’t always come from a product background, so they may […]
Show Your Work: How to Justify Your Decisions & Get Stakeholder Buy-In
Last month, I spoke at Mind the Product San Francisco. The following transcript is how the speech was written and does not match the talk exactly. — I want you to take a minute—think back to elementary school when you were learning multiplication tables. Don’t worry; I’m not going to make you do any math. […]
The Art of Managing Stakeholders Through Product Discovery
So, you’re feeling pretty good about your product discovery habits. You are interviewing customers, iterating on prototypes, running sound experiments, and your team is gaining confidence that you are on a path to reach your desired outcome. It feels like you’ve reached product team nirvana. There’s only one problem. You shared your progress with your […]
Managing Product Teams for Success
I’ve been thinking about the challenges of managing product teams by outcomes. Most leaders want their teams to have the autonomy to go after an outcome, but they struggle with trusting that their teams will do the right things. Most teams want that autonomy, but they struggle with communicating their progress toward an uncertain outcome. […]